Visible to the public TWC: Small: Exposing Attack Vectors and Identifying Defense Solutions for Data Cellular NetworksConflict Detection Enabled

Project Details

Lead PI

Performance Period

Sep 01, 2013 - Aug 31, 2018

Institution(s)

University of Michigan Ann Arbor

Award Number


This project addresses several key emerging security challenges that arise due to the wildly successful large-scale adoption of mobile devices with diverse network capabilities. The novel approach focuses on to understanding how various information that are legitimately and willingly provided by smartphone users due to the requested permissions of downloaded applications can be potentially abused. The second research focus is to identify improvements in the design of cellular network middlebox (e.g., firewall) policies by detailed exposure and explicitly defining the key requirements. Using insights from the two research thrusts, support to detect abuse of network resources by mobile devices is explored, leveraging both existing mechanisms and new improvements for evaluation. There are three key areas of technical contributions from this project: (1) Investigation of the construction of cellular botnets from non-traditional means, (2) Discovery of the deficiency of cellular network policies to resource abuse and targeted attacks, and (3) Misbehavior detection of mobile devices in abusing infrastructure resources to gain unfair advantages in network and energy usage.

This project will have significant and broad impact on both the networking security community and our society, as effective reliance on mobile devices for information access is rapidly growing and security assurance of cellular data network infrastructure is critical to achieving robust and highly available mobile networks and network services. Any software developed in this work will be available to the research community and the network operator community. Associated experimental tools and specific experimental configurations will be released through web venues.